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| - It might be a little difficult to believe navigating through its streets, but Montreal is the Canadian analogue to New York City. NYC is roughly 3% of the US population (8/320 million), Montreal is roughly 3% of the Canadian population (1.2/40 million). Both were founded on islands between 2 rivers (Manhattan and Long island/Montreal and Laval), both were found upon maritime traffic (St. Lawrence vs Hudson/Erie Canal), and both are laid out with the "north" defined by its street grid (North for New Yorkers are Northeast towards Westchester, Nord for Montrealites faces Northwest towards Laval). Both are defined by ethnic diversity, tolerance, work hard-play hard attitudes, distinctive stiff-upper-lip old money society (upper-east-side vs. golden square mile, Rockefeller vs. Bronfman), and their appreciation for the arts. The latter qualities are on prominent display at their respective art institutions.
Okay, first, some clues headed your way. DO NOT pay the retail admission for this museum - sure, it's worth it considering the size of the museum (5 annexes and major collections of interest for only 23 CAD), but what you want is the Montreal museum pass, which gives you a 3 day unlimited pass to pretty much all of Montreal's museums for 75 CAD, and that dough is farmed out to all participating museums, benefitting them all. If you want a 3 day STM Metro/bus pass tossed in? That's 5 CAD extra, please. If you come to Montreal for a week chances are good that you will run into some lousy weather for at least 2 days - use those as museum days and hit the MAC, the McCord, the Redpath, the Biodome, the Botanical garden, the planetarium, the Biblioteque Quebecois, etc. You will want to spend an afternoon at the Musee d'Beaux Arts Montreal.
Okay, what to see? Well, during my past visits there has always been a theme exhibit. In 6/2011 it was the Chinese Terra-Cotta Army, in 9/2014 it was the Faberge eggs, and in 3/2017, it was the works of Marc Chagall (amazing repertoire of drawings, music arrangements, costumes, culminating in the ceiling for the Opera Garnier in Paris, not bad for a schmuck from Belarus). The museum itself is divided into 5 parts. All buildings are interconnected via the basement/cellar level (those who has been to the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art will find it very familiar), and in those basement levels, there are typically contemporary/post-modern art (you know, hand grenade furniture, pickled shark, that kind of thing). The building is the Desmarais, where the theme exhibits are hosted (and where the main entrance and the restaurant is located). The back of this building connects to the Renata pavilion, which hosts their classical-to-early-modern stuff, what old people would consider to be "art". The Renata pavilion is kinda interesting in that the romanticism section actually uses projectors and LCDs to create that moonlight-in-a-forest atmosphere that so many people find "romantic".
If you head across Rue Sherbrooke and take a right, that's the Bourgie building of Canadian works. The Bourgie Pavilion is not large, and it is divided into multiple floors of differing eras, starting with the earliest works on the top and getting closer to contemporary works as you descend back to the cellar. You got whalebone sculptures, Inuit inuksuks, church drawings from when this was the Signoralty of Ville Marie, early English colonial art school attempts, early 19th century local artists revealing techniques learned from English, French and American schools, to later local works of increasing confidence. The ground floor level features works that reveal a distinct Quebec identity (not French, not English) and some understanding of the two-solitudes (The French societies do their own thing, the Anglos their own, and they don't really go out of the way to understand each other). Now if you head left, it's the Hornstein pavilion, which features world art (if you want to see mummies, Aztec bongs and Mesai warrior shields, it's right there)...although it's not a large collection (this ain't the Met or the AMNH in NYC). However, the real payoff here is the Stewart pavilion, which is the newest pavilion here and the one that most visitors forget about - which is the Design pavilion featuring decorative arts, stained glass, local design works (Montreal has a video game industry and is the HQ to MegaBloks, so you'll see the main character from Thief rendered in MegaBloks form). There is also a curio section with weird stuff like some local gunsmith who made working scale models of firearms.
So yeah, if you think Montreal can't possibly match the output of an alpha city like NYC, think again. Just remember that this is the second largest Francophone city in the world and the second largest Canadian city. Their art output is of world standards, and their art museum is top-notch. I would not hesitate to return again and again.
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